Chapter 10 Inscription on "Selected Novels of Literature and Art Series"

"Ta Kung Pao Literary Supplement" has been published for more than a year, and now I will put forward the short stories that belong to creation in this first year, select a few, and print them as separate volumes for readers to read more conveniently. This work should indeed please the conscientious writer and reader alike. There are not many articles here, and there are not many people, but it is still solid and full in a small anthology, and it can fill people with joyful hope when they are held in hand. We are not afraid that after the reader has read it, the hope that has been raised may be dimmed into disappointment.Because this disappointment may be unavoidable. If readers sincerely hold great ideals for the creation world, they will already have extraordinary expectations in their hearts.But as long as it's an honest response from readers, we're not afraid.Because here is a bunch of honest achievements of the author, which together represent a part of the creative world's experiment in a year. No matter what standard is used to measure it, no one has a word to judge its success or failure.

Now let’s take the editor’s impressions of these multiple works as a reference for readers to browse and review this anthology, simply a few comments below. If we take a bird's-eye view of this small situation, at least one of the most striking phenomena unfolds before our eyes.In these works, there seems to be a very biased tendency in the choice of subject matter: that is, it tends to describe the life of rural or less educated people or laborers.This tendency is not accidental. To put it better, our era has strong sympathy and concern for them—farmers and laborers; to put it worse, it is a phenomenon of blindly following the trend of the times.But it's fairest to say that both of the above reasons have something to do with it.It has become a trend to describe the labor society with a rural color, and it has also achieved some success in the literary and art circles.Beginning writers, or writers with weak personalities, are prone to unconsciously and imitate all kinds of already-established styles in writing.Especially in our era, young writers are very sad that they enjoy material goods and are superior to the general less educated people, so they naturally want to know the poverty of the countryside and become interested in the remote hinterland. Life does not write.Taking a single article as an example, many of them are well written, and some are particularly wonderfully written.However, judging from the overall experiment in the creative world, this bias indicates weakness and lack of creative power.And writing for the motive of conscience, the artistic content of that work will be questioned.We hope that the anthology can reveal this lack of creativity, or artistic innocence at this point, and stimulate writers themselves to be more individual and more enthusiastic to portray this multi-faceted and intricate life, not sticking to any one angle.

Apart from the bias towards subject matter mentioned above, there is no doubt about the seriousness of creating literature and art.Under the smoke screen of fluent writing in the previous era, novels that satirized individuals to gain popular humor have now been invisible to the door of hard-working creators, and have declined to the point of extinction.This situation is indeed a good phenomenon worthy of our authors and readers to celebrate. In terms of description, we feel that most of them use the method of writing a story, or centering on one or two characters, or taking the beginning and end of an event in a certain place as the main body, and simply developing and ending.This is also a relatively weak method.This is why we suspect that many authors have misunderstood the limitations of the short story and overestimated its possibilities.Few people try to take a bold section of life, and not many people take it seriously to show the contradictions of personal life.This is also a pity among us.

As for the level and average level of short story skills here, the editor has to ask readers to pay attention without avoiding suspicion.Undoubtedly, in terms of structure, description, and distribution of narration and dialogue, most authors have already used it maturely and naturally.Jerky, childish and lengthy works, which were unashamedly scattered in various printed materials in the early days of the new literature and art, have now completely disappeared.The coherence of the whole text, the economy of words, the arrangement of key points, and the vividness of colors and pictures have become very common standards.We believe that readers will not be unaware of those advantages in each chapter; for those places, the editors have been given a lot of joy and hope.

Finally, if it is not too far away from the topic, we have to talk about our views on the author and his works in detail.The most important part of the work is honesty.The importance of honesty lies in the freshness of the subject matter, the integrity of the structure, and the fluentness of the writing.That is to say, the work must be honest to the life that the author understands objectively and experiences subjectively.Even if the scenes of the novel are entirely fictitious, the emotions in the content must be borrowed from the realistic and experienced emotions, and the sad "plot" must not be supported by emptiness and falsehood!The so-called honesty does not mean that the author must actually go through the life mentioned in the work, but that the life mentioned in the work is indeed what the author understands very clearly intellectually and can experience it very emotionally. situation or personality.Many people deliberately choose some special romantic life that they are not familiar with as the subject matter because they feel guilty that their lifestyle is not new, and then extort their limited imagination to exaggerate the emotions they do not have, so as to deceive readers. sympathy.This kind of creation is a waste of words to exaggerate hypocritical scenes and sentimentality, and those serious readers who want to enrich their life and understand life from literature and art will naturally feel very impatient and disappointed.

The richness of life does not lie in the variety of ways of living, such as being an apprentice, pulling a rickshaw, going to Gansu and Yunnan, but the sharpness of objective observation and subjective feeling at the same time, can understand in many ways And taste what you see, hear, encounter, all kinds of different situations; you have to understand the relationship and involvement of people in life; the dramatic changes between the fixed and the accidental; finally, you have to have your own special views and ideas, beliefs or philosophies. A person who has lived a rich life is no longer seeing certain things objectively, but is able to elicit very complex and very different emotions subjectively, and is able to sympathize with many aspects of human nature.

Therefore, an author, in addition to the technical knowledge of using words, must be able to stand on any life, be able to move between subjectivity and objectivity, between feeling and understanding, be able to advance and retreat rationally, be unrestrained emotionally, and interweave memories and fantasies. Auxiliary, to the extent that true is false and false is true, his works are full of vitality and sincerity.Only then will his works be full and great, unaffected by subject matter or words, but enduring and universally moving. Of course, readers understand these truths better than authors, so the evaluation of works is always in the hands of serious readers. This is one of the reasons why this anthology has to be printed and dedicated to its impartial judges.